


Burning Bright

by summerartist



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Brilliant!Donna, Excited!Ten, Fluff, Gen, Science, space
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-18
Updated: 2020-01-18
Packaged: 2021-02-27 07:49:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 927
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22303669
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/summerartist/pseuds/summerartist
Summary: The Tenth Doctor discovers something new about Donna. Now, if only he can tone down his enthusiasm.
Comments: 5
Kudos: 30





	Burning Bright

The Doctor had been talking to Donna. She gave no indication that she could hear him, no matter how loud he became or how exaggerated he made his movements. She sat curled up on a couch in the library. All around her there had been plastic containers of relatively similar sizes, and on her head had been- Well, it was no wonder she couldn’t hear him.

“Donna!”

At last, his voice seemed to penetrate past the padding of the listening device. She turned her head and murmured a quiet, “Hmm?”

The Doctor stared at her for a moment. She seemed quite content, her body language and posture unusually loose.

“Could you take those off for a minute?” He asked.

“What?” She looked up at him.

“What are you even listening to? Abba, Paul McCartney, L- er- Kpop?” The Doctor gently prised the headphones off and slid them over his ears.

The Doctor expected his ear drums to be assaulted by...something. What he did not expect was the smooth voice of a famous astrophysicist rolling over his senses. He blinked, eyes widening as he turned his gaze to his companion. Her face had flushed a deep shade of pink and she started making attempts to retrieve her confiscated property.

Her cross demands filtered in. “You take those off right now! Haven’t you ever heard of a little thing called privacy! It wasn’t what I meant to listen to, anyway!”

The Doctor’s eyes lit up, his features transforming with the sheer fervor of what he was feeling.

“Neil deGrasse Tyson. You were listening to Neil deGrasse Tyson.” He beamed at her.

Good ol’ Neil was talking about Quarks and Carbon. It was introductory information, but still fairly in-depth. Donna had been listening to a description of how the universe had been formed. The headphones were wrenched from his head and held possessively by his companion.

“Oh Donna, this is...” This was even better than finding out about Donna’s tiny hiccups. Come to think of it, she had appeared nearly as furious during that occasion as she did now. He did not pause to decipher those signals though, not when he had found out that his Donna was interested in _space_ _._

“Has he talked about dark matter yet? Oh, you’ll _love_ it when I show you all there is to know about dark matter. It was such a mystery to humans throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.”

“Thanks, but no,” Donna said shortly.

“No?”

“No.”

The Doctor’s posture started to deflate. “No, he hasn’t talked about it yet, or no...” The rest didn’t bear thinking about.

“I mean no, thank you, but I just want to listen to this,” Donna said simply.

The Doctor’s gaze dimmed and the manic grin slipped from his face.

“Oh, you chump.” She elbowed him gently and with affection. “I want to learn at my own pace, alright? No crazy trips past black holes and back in time. We’ll do things like that again, but right now I just want to relax and listen to my book.”

The Doctor couldn’t imagine wanting to learn like that, not when they had the ability to literally go anywhere and at any time they wanted. But, Donna was different from a typical Time Lord. It might have been from her human side, or something just fundamentally Donna. Donna was tentative about showing the true extent of her smarts too. Oh, she would brag about being a “Super Temp,” but it was still a cover. Her encyclopedic-like memory was stuffed to the brim and she expanded on it all the time.

“ _She’s a smart one, our Donna,” Wilf had told the Doctor just a few days ago. “Her memory is like-” Wilf snapped his fingers to illustrate his point. “I always said we should enroll her in better classes, but Sylvia wouldn’t hear of it. She thought Donna would grow tired of them, but I knew that she had it in her.”_

The Doctor had remembered listening to this intently, but hadn’t known quite what to make of the information until now. If she wasn’t ready to show her curious side to him, fine, but he could still find a way to assist.

“Most of the Tardis’s digital tools and star maps are on the middle shelves in the library. Eye-level, so that they’re easier to access. And- Why are you staring at me like that?”

Donna was smiling indulgently at him. She usually did that when he had said something colossally bone-headed, but she had decided to be nice about it. “I reorganized the library, remember? I put them there to make them easier to find. The shelves were a mess.”

“Oh, right! Well, you should, ah, keep reading. Yep.” He rubbed at the back of his neck.

Donna saved him from more awkward rambling by resuming her recording from where she had left off. She gave the Doctor a smile that bordered on comforting. The Doctor could not help but return it.

Eventually, the Doctor and Donna went on trips to meet Neil deGrasse Tyson, Carl Sagan, and Stephen Hawking. Donna had wisely chosen discreet ways to meet them without disrupting humanity’s timeline, and the Time Lord grudgingly accepted their non-interference.  
  
The Doctor started teaching Donna the ways of the Tardis and how to pilot her. The extra studying had proved useful while traveling space and the Time Vortex. Donna was well on her way to becoming something more, and where it would lead, the whole universe was eager to find out.

The End.


End file.
